Current Exhibition
Kirk Palmer, Hiroshima (film still), S16mm film, 2007.
Courtesy of the artist.
Featuring:
Emily Allchurch Ronnie Close Andrew Cross Michelle Deignan
Sarah Dobai Rachel Goodyear Jock Mooney Kirk Palmer
ArtSway presents Based on a True Story, an exhibition featuring artists whose work explores the varying levels of reality and fiction that shapes and informs our collective experiences and shared histories.
A common definition of the term ‘Based on a True Story’ is a cinematic one – a catchall subtitle that precedes the opening credits of, for example, a biographical film. It is a title that, although referring to ‘actual events’, subtly suggests that these so-called ‘based on’ events are being manipulated purely for enhanced dramatic effect. Similarly, in political circles and the media (particularly newspapers), an equivalent term to ‘Based on a True Story’ is the modern day concept and usage of ‘spin’ – the perceived massaging of information and facts for political advantage.
The artists selected for Based on a True Story all, in essence, re-analyze commonplace events, ideas and encounters as experienced through everyday political and media influence. Often venturing into areas of underlying unease at the random acts of violence, faith, and love that characterize our everyday experiences – random acts that are often hidden away as 'background noise' in life, at the edges of our perceptions – the artists featured in Based on a True Story present works that re-interpret and re-contextualize our collective understanding of, and relationship to, the world around us.
Emily Allchurch’s light box photographs are inspired by the works of old masters, such as the Italian etcher Piranesi. Allchurch uses an original work as a guide, photographing elements of cities such as London, then collages the photographs into a facsimile of her source image, usually with a contemporary twist. Ronnie Close uses film and photographic works to explore the formation of historical narratives, focusing on the 1981 Irish Republican Hunger Strikes in Northern Ireland. Close’s work examines the complex relationship between myth versus historical truth and one’s reading of political events. The films of Andrew Cross focus on the specific nature of an ‘event’ as defined by ‘live’ or recorded musical performance. Cross is interested in the experience of these events and how they are mediated through memory and the manner of their recording. Michelle Deignan's films are concerned with the complexities of the mediation of our experiences, culture and politics. Her works examine the representation of facts and fictions, drawing on a wide range of interests such political ideologies and autobiography.
Sarah Dobai engages a tradition of realism concerned with contemporary lived reality through her exploration of the social, physical and psychic relations between subjects and spaces. Staging scenarios rather than portraits, Dobai teases out a web of links between an event, developed in dialogue with a site, and the actions or inaction of figures located therein. Rachel Goodyear’s drawings present captured moments where characters exist in the absence of social etiquette. All of her works share a common language delivering ambiguous tales of fears and desires through an imagined world between awake and dream. Visually, the collages of Jock Mooney are inspired by a combined obsession for Japanese prints, 1960s underground comics and the Italian Gialli genre of filmmaking. His wreath-like collages are inspired by the world around us, inspirations we notice, perhaps, only fleetingly. In the work of Kirk Palmer the contemplative nature of the artist’s gaze teases out nuances in subject matter, lending the work a poetic quality. Palmer is intrigued by what lies on the threshold of our awareness – that which we intuit or experience momentarily. His photographs and films often explore the notion that traces of the past, whether actual, merely imagined, or remembered, somehow remain manifest in the present.
Exhibition Associated Events:
Preview, Director's Welcome and Book Launch
Saturday 3 July 2010, 2pm - 5pm
ArtSway Director Mark Segal will give an official welcome at 3pm, followed by the launch of a publication featuring works by all the artists included in Based on a True Story. FREE: All Welcome.
Free Coach from London for Based on a True Story Preview
Saturday 3 July 2010
A free coach from London will leave from opposite Tate Britain, Millbank at 10:30am for the opening of the exhibition. The coach will return to London for 7pm. COST: £5 per person to reserve a seat which will be refunded on the day. Please contact the gallery for payment options.
Portfolio Day
Friday 16 July 2010, 10am - 4pm
A portfolio day with ten half-hour slots for artists from all backgrounds for critiques, portfolio reviews and career advice from ArtSway Curator Peter Bonnell and ArtSway Associate Artist, Dinu Li. COST: £5 per person. Booking Essential.
Art in Context: Curator's Talk: Based on a True Story
Wednesday 11 August 2010 at 7pm
Join ArtSway curator Peter Bonnell for a special tour of the exhibition Based on a True Story. Following the tour there will be a lecture focusing on the work and ideas that inspired the exhibition. FREE: Booking Essential.
Special Screening Event and Gallery Talk: Andrew Cross
Saturday 28 August 2010. Talk begins at 7pm. Screening: dusk – 11pm
As part of Based on a True Story, Andrew Cross will give a talk, at ArtSway, about his work and ideas. Following his lecture, there will be a special screening of Andrew’s new film The Solo (2010) in ArtSway’s courtyard, from dusk to 11pm. The Solo is a film made in collaboration with Carl Palmer, the drummer from 70s rock group Emerson, Lake and Palmer. FREE: Booking Essential.
To book a place on any of the above events please contact Jack Lewis on 01590 682260 (ext.6) or email: jack.lewis@artsway.org.uk
WIth grateful support from
Tim Simmons, Blue Lagoon, 2010. Courtesy of the artist.
Tim Simmons, Red Rocks and Moss, 2010.
Courtesy of the artist
UK based photographic artist Tim Simmons’ INTERVENTION series consists of large-scale, landscapes. He works with a large format camera and artificial lighting to accentuate detail in a way that natural light does not. The resulting images have a surreal, otherworldly quality, in the realms of fantasy, beyond obvious recognition. This illusive atmosphere inspires quiet reflection, prompting questions about mortality and our place in the world.
Tim’s work has an inherent connection to the environment. It examines the multilayered relationship we have with our surroundings, and how subtle changes to our expectation of a place alter our perception of it. Through this exploration of organic form, his imagery elicits an immediate, visceral response to its aesthetic presence and beauty, drawing attention to the fragility of our planet.
Artist Statement
I have developed my own twilight photography over the past two decades, with a particular and unusual focus on the use of artificial lighting within the landscape. As an artist I intervene upon the land almost irreverently, modeling it in my vision rather than succumbing to it. By using the natural elements of the landscape as if they were subjects within a controlled studio environment, familiar places are transformed into unbelievable, unknown, uncharted territories. My work examines the multi-layered relationship we have with the world around us, and how subtle changes to our expectation of a place alter and inform our perception of it. Stark and haunting, these images set out to elicit a deep, visceral response, awakening a sense of our profound isolation, and prompting questions about mortality and potential traces of life in absence.
These Iceland images are a continuation of this working practice. Iceland is not an easy destination to get to, and the fact that it is so remote is part of what makes it such a unique location. It is also one of the few places in the world where you can literally view the surface of the earth as an open wound. Most places we experience aren’t this raw. It offers such extremes, from active volcanoes to geothermal sites, on a truly humbling scale. It is a tough and
uncompromising place to work, both mentally and physically, but the strange, diverse landscape is unlike anywhere else I have worked.
An installation piece of this body of work entitled 'INTERVENTION, projected' comprises a freestanding 20’x15’ projection screen, during July this series will be showing here in July with associated events:
Gallery Event: ‘INTERVENTION, projected’ by Tim Simmons
Thursday 22 July – Saturday 24 July 2010, dusk – 11pm each evening
ArtSway is pleased to present a presentation of Tim Simmons’ ‘INTERVENTION, projected’, a companion event alongside Based on a True Story. A large screen will be situated in ArtSway’s courtyard, onto which Simmons will project examples of his many photographic works. FREE: All Welcome.
Gallery Talk: Tim Simmons: ‘INTERVENTION, projected’
Friday 23 July 2010 at 7pm
Photographer Tim Simmons will give a talk on his work, and his installation ‘INTERVENTION, projected', situated in ArtSway’s courtyard.
FREE: Booking Essential.
To book a place please contact Jack Lewis on 01590 682260 (ext.6) or email: jack.lewis@artsway.org.uk
To see more of Tim’s work and related projects please visit:
Artist Statements and Biographies
Emily Allchurch, Urban Chiaroscuro No.2, London
(after Piranesi), 2008. Courtesy of the artist.
Emily Allchurch biography
Emily Allchurch, born 1974, is a UK artist, living and working in London. She graduated from the Royal College of Art Sculpture course in 1999 and has since established an international reputation with her backlit photographic reconstructions of old master paintings and prints set within a contemporary idiom.
She has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, with solo and group exhibitions including Paper City: Urban Utopias Royal Academy of Art, London (2009), Urban Chiaroscuro Galeria Galica, Milan (2008) and Frost & Reed Contemporary, London (2007), The Light Fantastic Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto (2007), Lumiere, transparence, opacite, Nouveau Musee National de Monaco (2006) and Metropolitanscape, Palazzo Cavour, Turin (2006). Her work has been published in numerous publications including Portfolio (issue 47), Blueprint, FMR, /Seconds 7, Printmaking Today, Arte and Design Week.
Allchurch's work is represented in international public and private collections including Nouveau Musee National de Monaco, Financial Services Authority, Aspen Re Insurance and Galleria Parmeggiani. In 2005 and 2007 she was commissioned to represent the Southeast region of Britain in the BBC series’ A Digital Picture of Britain and Britain in Pictures. In 2006 she was visiting artist at the Alberta College of Art & Design, Canada, artist in residence at the Financial Services Authority, London and an invited artist in the inaugural photography festival in Reggio Emilia, Italy. For more information visit: www.emilyallchurch.com
Ronnie Close, Night Time Room, 2009. Courtesy of the artist.
Ronnie Close biography and statement
Ronnie Close is an Irish photographic artist and filmmaker currently based in Bristol. He has participated in video and photographic exhibitions throughout Ireland, UK, Europe, USA, Canada and Syria.
Ronnie Close’s practice looks at the ambiguity of historical narratives contained within the image. The practice investigates the visual slippage between artifice and the role of photographic veracity. Images can exist paradoxically as both fictional and factual records but rarely reveal their own means of production or break with illusion. Close’s formal strategy takes extracts or traces from the physical world and sets about transforming these gathered materials into a critical encounter with political and personal conflicts. Visually the work asks questions of what we know and how we think we know it, as means to discuss the use of images in the overt construction of a fiction-point of view. In this way we define what is made visible or invisible and determined by possible modes of perception. Currently this is represented through the motif of martyrdom in the 1981 Irish Republican Hunger Strikes as a series of events with mythic and political resonances. The art practice visually responds to historical incidents to usefully disrupt a sense of cohesion amongst competing if latent beliefs.
Video: Night-Time Room (2009)
This short film work has been influenced by the contemporary residue of the 1981 Irish Republican ex-Hunger Strikes in Northern Ireland. The film’s character has been shaped by his political past and conflict with contemporary life. Night-Time Room transforms the domesticity of his personal space and everyday existence towards more estranged meanings. The approach combines photographic stasis with theatre-like conventions to explore the subject in a fusion of form with content. The film interweaves these elements to offer a personal insight and portrait of a political figure who is confined by his own past.
Duration: 11.54 mins/ Single-screen, 16:9, Format RED, Digital, DVD.
Video: I Remember (2010)
This two-screen video work has been edited together from a series of interviews with three 1981 Irish Republican ex-Hunger Strikers from Northern Ireland. Each interviewee responds to questioning on their experience of hunger striking. This work helps provide a realistic context to Night-Time Room and anchors the fictional form in the memorial trace of these figures.
A second screen displays a different scene of a local theatre production, written by ex-prisoners, that relates these testimonies in a vernacular form.
The relational composite of this video work, I Remember, with Night-Time Room creates a series of representations of historical experience. Such an approach raises questions on authorship and the role of the subject in the creation of meaning. Our understanding of events are mediated and constructed from such documents, as we become reminded of the unreliable nature of memory in the formation of contested histories.
Duration: 10.30 mins/ Two-screen, 4:3, Digital, DVD.
Websites:
Picture This
www.picture-this.org.uk/worksprojects/works/by-date/2009/night-time-room
Website Personal
Axis: Open Frequency Profile
www.axisweb.org/seCVWK.aspx?ARTISTID=13964
University of Wales, Newport
Andrew Cross, Achilles Last Stand, still, digital video, 2008.
Courtesy of the artist.
Andrew Cross Biography
Andrew Cross is interested in relationships between landscape and the memories that they may evoke. After graduating in Painting at Bath Academy of Art in 1983 Cross established a successful career as a curator. He began making and exhibiting his own work in the late 1990s and is now a lecturer in photography at Southampton Solent University.
Known for his work on US railroads and transport infrastructures, Cross’s first book of photographs Some Trains in America was published in 2001 and his first video work was short-listed for Beck’s Futures in 2004. Also in 2004 3 hours from here: An English Journey – a film about post-industrial landscape and economy – was commissioned by Film & Video Umbrella and the John Hansard Gallery. An exhibition of all his US railroad video work was held at George Eastman House Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester New York in 2008.
More recently Cross has been focusing on Salisbury Plain, the landscape of his early youth, and the sites of 1970s rock festivals. His recent collaborations with rock musicians made famous during the 1970s bring further consideration to memory and the shifting nature of cultural value.
Michelle Deignan, Our Land, still, digital video, 2008.
Courtesy of the artist.
Michelle Deignan Biography
Michelle Deignan is an Irish artist who lives and works in London. Her video narratives examine events, places or landmarks in their widest context, overlapping the past with the present, the local with the global, personal experience and public knowledge with fictional and factual proclamations, to reveal the complexities implicit in contemporary sites and occurrences.
Michelle Deignan's work has been exhibited in national and international exhibitions and screenings including: 'transmediale.08', House of World Cultures, Berlin, 'New Work UK: Trust Yourself', Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 'Terror and the Sublime: Art in an Age of Anxiety' at the Crawford Gallery, Cork; 'Event Site: Presentation and Screenings on The Place of Artist' Cinema', Picture This Atelier, Bristol; 'For your eyes only', Mains d'Oeuvres, Paris and 'Trajector Art Fair', Brussels. Forthcoming 2010 exhibitions include ‘'Oneiriography',’ at Green on Red, Dublin with Simon and Tom Bloor, Ruth Ewan and Ragnar Kjartansson. For more information please visit: www.michelledeignan.info
Sarah Dobai, Emmanuel, lambdachrome print mounted
on aluminium, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.
Sarah Dobai Biography
Sarah Dobai works with photography, film and video, she has exhibited widely in the UK, Europe and America. Recent exhibitions include Theatres of the Real, Antwerp FotoMuseum (2009), Darkside 2, Winterthur FotoMusuem (2009), Studio/ Location Photographs, Works| Projects (2009), Sarah Dobai; Photographs and a Film, Galerie Zurcher, Paris (2008), Dispari Dispari, Reggio Emilia (2008) Innocence and Experience, Gimpel Fils, London (2007) and Sarah Dobai, Artists’ Space, New York (2003). In 2006 Kettles Yard, Cambridge presented a major solo show of selected photographs and a specially commissioned two screen video projection ‘Model 280’.
In 2007 she won a Film London Award to produce a new 16mm film ‘Nettlecombe’ which showed at Tate Modern, FACT Liverpool and Dundee Contemporary Arts. Her new body of photographs Studio/Location Photographs were featured Art World Magazine’s September 2009. Her work is featured in Charlotte Cotton's ‘The Photograph as Contemporary Art’ Thames & Hudson, and is included in the new edition of Michel Poivert’s’ ‘La Photographie Contemporaine’, Flammarion Presse 2010.
Rachel Goodyear, Hooded Crow, (detail from Won't
Give It Back), pencil on inner cardboard from cigarette packet, 2008.
Courtesy of the artist and The International 3.
Rachel Goodyear Biography
Rachel Goodyear completed BA (Hons) Fine Art at Leeds Metropolitan University in 2000 since when she has been practicing art in Manchester. With a strong focus on Drawing, she has exhibited nationally and internationally including ‘The Drawing Room’, Tate Liverpool for the Liverpool Biennial, 2008; ‘4 Women’, 2009, Jack Hanley Gallery New York, and was short listed for ‘The Northern Art Prize’, 2009, Leeds City Art gallery. Her solo shows include ‘The Converging Ends Were Misaligned’, 2009, Houldsworth Gallery, London; and ‘They Never Run, Only Call’, 2009, The International 3, Manchester.
Goodyear looks for unlikely relationships in everything she encounters and weaves new narratives and mythologies out of everyday incidentals and age-old superstitions . From this internal scrapbook she creates carefully constructed coincidences that are delicate in their nature and unsettling in their content.
For ‘Based on a True Story’, Goodyear presents a collection of drawings both on paper and found ephemera. Each displays an ambiguous narrative, yet all have a nugget of truth at their heart.
Jock Mooney, To Kiss the Palms of Death, acrylic and
ink on card collage, 2009. Courtesy of the artist.
Jock Mooney Biography
It might not be obvious, but Jock Mooney is part of a tradition. At first glance you might presume I’m referring to a tradition of men obsessively scaling the world down to a manageable size, so they can vainly reassert some control over their demons: constipated, grey bank clerks tying voodoo doppelgangers of branch managers to 00 scale train tracks in dimly lit attics in Croydon. That’s a tradition for sure, but not the one I’m thinking of. No, Mooney’s cavalcade of human folly, variously depicted in his sculptures, drawings and songs, is ripe with signs of the carnivalesque.
John Beagles from the essay "A Feast of Folly".
Kirk Palmer, Hiroshima (film still), S16mm film, 2007.
Courtesy of the artist.
Kirk Palmer
Kirk Palmer’s practice investigates the specificities and interstices of the still and movingimage. The contemplative nature of the artist’s gaze teases out nuances in his subject matter,lending his work a poetic quality. Landscape and sense of place can be seen as broad themes, as can the existential nature of our relationship with the world. Palmer is intrigued by
what lies on the threshold of our awareness – that which we intuit or experience momentarily. His photographs and films, such as State (2004), often explore the notion that traces of thepast, whether actual, merely imagined, or remembered, somehow remain manifest in the present.
The artist’s most recent works are thoughtful outpourings from time spent in Japan. The visually arresting, black and white video Murmur (2006) was shot in bamboo forests on the outskirts of Kyoto. The absorbing panoramic views of this terrain initially appear like lingering photographic stills in a slide projection sequence. However, the viewer’s eye soon picks up on small movements, signs of life: the gentle rustling of branches which transforms the abstract swathe of textured greys and blacks into an animate, eerily anthropomorphic forest. These movements gradually build to a crescendo as great gusts of wind whip through trees, sending them into a frenzy of arboreal gesticulation.
For Palmer, the history of landscape photography is a crucial influence. Questions of if, and how, the intangible properties of memory, atmosphere, or cultural identity are caught up in the physical substance of a place abound in Dwellings (2007) and Hiroshima (2007), poignant meditations upon the ghosts that can haunt a landscape. The Hiroshima of the latter film is a thriving, verdant place. We anticipate; have certain expectations of how the weight of history will bear on the images we see once the camera moves from the hills of the opening sequence, down into the city. Yet, once it does, this palpable tension dissolves – the people of Hiroshima go leisurely about their daily lives. That we, as an audience, should demand any less, says much about the historical burden of collective guilt we carry with us. Palmer’s decision not to film locations such as the Peace Memorial Park is not an attempt to assuage this guilt. If anything, the conspicuous absence of the tragedy serves to make its presence felt all the more, highlighting the delicate dichotomy of remembering and forgetting in which the city is entangled. Kirk Palmer lives and works in London.